COVID-19 Vaccine Scheduling for Kroger Health
Background
Kroger Health: 2,400 pharmacies and 200+ clinics located around United States in Kroger and Kroger Family Grocery stores.
This is a UX story about a true team effort. An effort that helped provide 11 million doses of a life saving vaccine to our fellow Americans. To say I’m proud of what we were able to accomplish with only 6 weeks to initially launch is, well, quite the understatement.
On December 11, 2020, the FDA issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for the use of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine. On December 18, 2020, the FDA issued an EUA for the use of the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine. And Kroger was part of a national effort to deploy covid vaccines in their pharmacies and clinics.
At the time, I was the product designer on My Prescriptions, a product focused on prescription management that just so happened to have an appointment scheduler for vaccines like flu, shingles, etc. One of the key benefits was it saved associate time at the appointment and gave peace of mind to the patient by helping to schedule appointments and created a digital record of patient information. There were a few variations of the scheduler for clinics or pharmacies and had not been evaluated for efficiency in a while. But in December 2020, I was asked to lead the design of the customer facing application for COVID vaccines using our current scheduler as the base.
Design Audit of Current Schedulers
Myself and another designer had already be in the works auditing all of our schedulers across clinic and pharmacy as part of a side projects. We saw an opportunity to streamline and build reusable UX components to serve multiple scheduling needs. I had a particular interest in the work since I completed a masters thesis on the psychology of waiting in healthcare. The stars really aligned and I could use the kernels of what I had learned to apply to this new public health challenge. If have read my post on the psychology of waiting, you will remember that people find that timely information, entertainment and setting expectations are key ingredients to changing the perception of a bad wait into a positive wait. Keep that in mind here!
Observation: Data analytic from our current flu appointment scheduler indicated that users had a high drop off rate when they get to the time selection step? I collaborated with a research group to investigate why this might be?
Data: 66% of the moderated test users were unable to independently navigate and schedule a vaccine appointment. When we look at the analytics 54.3% of people were dropping off at the date/time selector.
Insight 1: We forces people to pick a location upfront with out telling them if there would be appointments available.
Insight 2: To see other locations you would have to go back to the beginning and fill out all the forms again. And sometimes just to be disappointment again.
Industry Comparison
Design Sprint
I led a week long design sprint for our initial COVID-19 vaccine scheduler that had a deadline of just 6 weeks later. 🤯
Goal
Help as many customer as possible schedule both doses of the COVID vaccine, while make it easier for our associates to deliver those vaccines through an orderly process.
Challenges
Not everyone was eligible at first: Over 64 jurisdictions with their unique guidelines. We had to anticipate daily changes to our eligibility in order to provide this vaccine service to our customers. And continue to make chances every week 2 years later.
High Demand: We knew this would be the most desired product we have ever had to provide in our pharmacies and clinics. And we were about to have unprecedented traffic to our site.
Juggling needs: Multiple variables mattered for choosing an appointment. Availability was #1 in importance to customers, followed by location and time. In fact later we found people were willing to drive up to 2 hours during early days of the vaccine.
Alignment
The business came to the design and development team with a really long list of requirements that included customers need to be able to book both vaccine doses at once and be flexible to accommodate the ever-changing CDC changes. Three days later, we finalized the scope and got to work on what the ideal user journey. As a facilitator, I put a lot of importance on scoping and setting requirements and technical limitations. We only had 6 weeks to deliver so we want to be crystal clear. Armed with enough information, we could think of solutions that push the envelope but still grounded to reality.
Customer Journey
The future user journey took into account both what we learned from the scheduling audit and what we learned from other industry examples. We needed to show as many available appointments in the users set distance radius as possible to that they can quickly browse and grab an appointment that fits their needs or their loved ones needs. It was important to not waste users’ time filling out patient info to only find out that there were no available appointments. Take a look at the map, see the box called “decision”, that hypothesis led to a significant increase in successful completions than our old schedule, originally with only a 10% successful completion rate.
Associate Journey
Sketches
Inspired by the airline industry, members of the team went to work sketching how we might help out customer browse the most relevant appointments.
First Launched Designs
Note: Prior to launch there were numerous usability and accessibility tests completed to ensure language and over all UX meet users expectations.
2nd Iteration - Mix & Match Vaccines
Once we had the COVID-19 vaccine scheduler running, we were asked to incorporate all other vaccines that the clinic and pharmacy offers. The benefit being customers need to know of one place and way to schedule a vaccine. And in addition, they can now schedule multiple types in the same appointment. For example getting your flu and COVID booster in one sitting! Saving trips for the customer and set up time for the associate. Here showing that iteration in the accessibility mocks to ensure our design helped both visual and non-visual users.
Lyft Integration - continuing to serve our customers!
Collaboration with Lyft we have been able to provide 400+ ride free or discounted rides across areas that have been identified as place that have less access to transportation.
